


and if i asked for a sign

by orphan_account



Category: The Walking Dead (Comics), The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Codependency, Emotional Instability, Injury Recovery, M/M, Major Character Injury, Near Death Experiences, Parent/Child Incest, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-06
Updated: 2016-02-06
Packaged: 2018-05-18 16:13:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5934751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Where’s Ron?”</p><p>It’s probably not the first sentence Rick wants to hear come out of his son’s mouth under the circumstances. Carl knows that, but he has to ask. Has to know, before he hears any of the rest of the body count.</p><p>[post-6.09]</p>
            </blockquote>





	and if i asked for a sign

**Author's Note:**

> !!SPOILERS!! for one way events might go in 6.09
> 
> the premise for this fic assumes:
> 
> -about a week has passed since the events in 6.08  
> -Ron ends up filling the role Douglas Monroe played in the comics  
> -Carl's memory loss is fairly minimal; he gets confused about the order of events and some things are missing but it's mostly all still there  
> 

“Hey. You’re back with us.”

Rick’s voice is breathless and low, and it’s the first sound Carl hears when he opens his eyes – eye. The realization hits him strangely: he feels numb to it, not scared or angry or sad. None of the things he would have expected to feel.

“Hey,” he croaks back, fumbling for Rick’s hand.

All he wants right now is to be held, to be touched, the childish need to be told he’s going to be okay. He gives his dad’s fingers a feeble squeeze. Rick looks like he might cry, but the hand he scrubs over his mouth (his beard's grown in again – _how long have I been out?_ Carl thinks) obscures his expression.

Rick’s big fingers curled around his are soft and strong. It’s a warm, warm feeling, and he wants to wrap himself in it like a quilt and hide from the ache sitting like a hot iron in the left side of his face.

Neither of them speaks for a while.

Slowly, Carl fights his way through the haze of painkillers and jumbled memories trying to fit themselves into the right order and shakes his head a little. He remembers Ron’s face, the wild snarl twisting his mouth as he aimed blindly at Rick because Rick had – Jessie’s –

The phantom sensation of her blood gushing over his hand envelops him out of nowhere and he tries to sit up, overcome by nausea.

“Whoa! Not too fast, now,” says Rick, voice cut with worry. He gently presses Carl back down onto the pillows.

When he’s settled a little, Carl tries to take a few deep breaths to calm his jackhammering heart.

“Where’s Ron?”

It’s probably not the first sentence Rick wants to hear come out of his son’s mouth under the circumstances. Carl knows that, but he has to ask. Has to know, before he hears any of the rest of the body count.

Even after everything, he figures he owes it to Ron to at least give a fuck.

(In truth, he can’t keep himself from caring.)

Predictably, Rick’s mouth tightens into a firm line. “Don’t you worry about that right now,” he says.

“Dad, I need to know. You didn’t – kill him, did you?”

A dark look passes over Rick’s face, and his jaw sets up hard. “No, I didn't. But I _should_ have.”

 _I still might,_ his eyes say.

Carl turns this over in his head, tries to decide what to make of it. He’s glad, in a way, because he doesn’t want to be responsible for more blood on his dad’s hands – a kid’s blood, someone barely older than Carl. No matter how much has changed, he knows some part of Rick would never recover from that. It would be worse, somehow, than everything else.

On the other hand, because Ron is alive, and Sam and Jessie are not, now he’s dangerous. A threat. He’ll never be able to live peacefully with any of the rest of them again, but especially not Rick and Carl.

And at some point, that means they’ll have to deal with him...one way or another.

There’s the small, ugly part of Carl that sort of wishes Rick _had_ killed him, too, because he’s going to live the rest of his life with one eye in a world where he needs every advantage he can get if he’s going to survive. He’ll be a burden on Rick, now. What if he can’t shoot right anymore? What if it makes him clumsier, and he’s always making noise and drawing walkers to them?

But Ron being dead wouldn’t fix any of that. It would just make Rick meaner, greyer in the face, more like the people he’s spent this whole time protecting Carl from. So if the price for that part of his soul staying intact is that Ron gets to live a long life while Carl gimps around with a fucked-up face for the rest of his days, well.

He figures he can make his peace with that.

“No,” he says, looking up at the blank white of the ceiling. “You did the right thing.”

Rick sniffs roughly, and he folds both hands around Carl’s, head bent to study the fingers trapped between his own. Carl can feel his thumb tracing the lines on his palm, running over each of the grooves like beads on a rosary. Maybe he’s praying. It’s never come up, but Carl sort of doubts that’s something either of them does anymore.

If he believed the words went anywhere, though, and he could pray for just one person, it would be his dad.

Abruptly, Rick lifts Carl’s hand to his mouth and presses a kiss into the palm, lips slack with desperate gratitude. His whiskers scratch at Carl’s skin; the hot rush of his breath tickles as he exhales heavily through his nose. It’s passionate in a way Carl doesn’t completely understand, though he remembers the feeling that knocked the breath out of him when he saw his father limping toward him through the smoke at the prison and he thinks maybe he knows a little.

Strangely, this chaste touch feels more intimate in a sense than all the other ways their bodies have met. There’s something uncomfortably raw in the bow of Rick’s neck, his tired eyes screwed shut, hands trembling. Frowning, Carl uncurls his fingers to stroke Rick’s rough cheek and swallows.

“Are you okay?”

Rick shoots him a sharp look, like he’s sure he didn’t hear right.

“Am I – am _I_ okay?”

“Yeah.” Carl shimmies up his pillows so that he’s a little closer to sitting up and ignores Rick’s hand lifted in caution, fixes a knowing gaze on his face. “Alexandria’s probably pretty fucked now, right? And Jessie’s gone. You had to – because of me, because she wouldn’t let go.”

Rick opens his mouth to speak, but Carl cuts him off.

“I know how you felt about her, dad. And I know I said I didn’t want her around, but not like that. I never...I didn’t _want_ that. It had to be hard for you. Right?”

For a minute Rick watches him sideways, expression unreadable, with his mouth pursed and eyebrows drawn. Carl thinks, _I can handle it if he cries._ He tries to make himself believe he can handle it, if Rick has regrets about having to cut Jessie loose to save Carl.

Finally, Rick lets out a low, heavy breath. “No,” he says, looking at the far wall, not at Carl. “No, it wasn’t hard. Truth is, it was the easiest thing I’ve ever done.”

He doesn’t sound happy about it, or disturbed. Just...empty, like by saying it, he’s shaking hands with a part of himself he’s been trying not to look in the eye for a long time.

_Easiest thing I’ve ever done._

Carl squeezes his father’s hand and thinks it’s a miracle Ron Anderson is still alive.

He reaches out with shaky fingers and traces the outline of Rick’s jaw, his nose, the tired bags under his eyes and the unkempt beard that’s overgrown his face again, chasing away any lingering traces of deceptive softness. The level-headed keeper of the peace, the lawman, the good, reasonable man. He had worked to put each of those faces back on for Alexandria, so that their family could make a life here. So that he could have the kind of life that could have a woman like Jessie in it. And he had stripped them all away in an instant for Carl’s sake.

All of it, everything he’s done. It’s all been for Carl’s sake.

Underneath the varnish, the coat of nice paint, Rick isn’t good or bad, Carl thinks. Cut him to the quick and he’s what his son has always known him to be: a father, before everything else.

“It’s okay, dad.” He says it softly, but even though Rick’s eyes are shut, his face leaned into Carl’s palm, Carl knows he hears. “It’s okay to not be okay.”

Slowly, Rick opens his eyes. He lays Carl’s hand back down on the crisp white sheets, leans in to press a kiss to his forehead, careful of the bandages covering the right side of his son’s face. When he pulls back he lingers with his nose pressed to Carl’s, one rough hand stroking his cheek.

“How’d you get to be so wise, for somebody so young?”

“Heard Carol say it to somebody,” Carl admits.

Rick laughs wetly, the sound surprised out of him. “Yeah, that sounds like Carol.”

He leans back and wipes at his eyes. Rick’s never been the sort of man to avoid crying out of a macho sense of embarrassment, even back when Carl was a kid and the sorts of things there were to cry about were pretty minor, in hindsight. So the sight of his dad’s tears isn’t new or shocking to Carl. Still, it tightens something in his chest, and he reaches up to help wipe the wetness from Rick’s cheeks.

It surprises him when Rick leans in to kiss him again, this time on the mouth, quick and intense. There’s no tongue, no teeth, nothing remotely sexual about it at all, but Carl’s good eye flutters shut and his whole body arches into the point of contact. He grabs at the back of Rick’s neck awkwardly.

They part with a soft, wet pop and Carl looks up, feeling a little dazed.

“What was that for?” he asks, rubbing absently at the curls threaded between his fingers.

“Because,” Rick murmurs, “It’s actually true. I really _am_ okay, Carl. I’ve still got you. We’ve got this place. Things are gonna work out, somehow, and I’m so damn _grateful_.”

He pauses to take a steadying breath, brushes Carl’s hair back from his forehead where it isn’t plastered down by bandages.

“For a while while you were out, I didn’t know what was gonna happen. I couldn’t imagine things ever being okay again. But I thought if you would just wake up, if I could just have that one thing – then it would all be alright. And now you’re awake and Denise says you’re gonna be okay and I can’t believe how goddamn _lucky_ we are. You woke up and looked at me and I felt like the luckiest man alive.”

“But not everyone got lucky like us,” Carl observes.

He thinks of Jessie and Sam, of Ron’s face as he squeezed off a round meant for Rick’s head, of the screams and shouts rising up from all over Alexandria. He doesn’t feel lucky, not the way Rick’s talking about.

Yes, he’s glad to be here with his dad, alive and with a chance to fight for another day drawing breath. He’s grateful he got to feel what it was like to be kissed again, grateful that Rick didn’t really love Jessie, that he didn’t even like her too much to hesitate when it was a choice between her and Carl. He guesses, in a fucked-up way, he got everything he wanted. But it feels like they’ve lost something, too, something he can’t put his finger on.

“No, they didn’t,” Rick finally agrees, solemn. “But we’re still here, Carl. That’s the important thing. We’ll rebuild this place – make it safer, so that we don’t have to lose people like this again.”

“I guess.”

“It’ll work,” Rick promises. He traces Carl’s eyebrow with his thumb, studying his face with a look like Carl is the only thing he’s ever seen in his whole life. “It has to.”

Carl isn’t so sure. He wants to believe in everything Rick says. He misses the comfort of being able to take every word out of his dad’s mouth for absolute gospel. Those days are long gone, though; he knows better now. When Rick says _it’ll be okay,_ Carl knows what he’s really saying is, _I need it to be okay. I want it to be._

When he says _I’m okay,_ Carl thinks in some ways it would make things easier to believe he’s lying.

“Okay. We’ll make it work.” He makes a big, pointed display of yawning. “I’m pretty tired. I think it’s the painkillers. Do you mind if I just sleep for a while?”

“Of course. Sure.” Rick’s response is immediate. He nods and starts fussing with the sheets, making sure they’re tucked in, as if Carl was five again.

If there weren’t a heavy lump of apprehension sitting in Carl’s stomach like a stone, it would probably be endearing. He shifts guiltily, letting Rick run his hands over him like he’s making sure he’ll really still be there if he leaves to let Carl sleep. He smooths one big palm over Carl’s stomach, pats him hesitantly before getting up.

He bends down to kiss Carl’s forehead again, softly, just a whisper of beard and wet lips.

“I won’t go far. You wake up, you need anything, you have Denise get me, alright?”

“Yeah.”

With one last, lingering look that travels down to the end of the bed and then up to rest on Carl’s face a minute longer, Rick makes to leave. A shadow of something crosses his face as turns away. _I really am okay,_ he said.

Carl reaches out and catches his sleeve.

“Dad?”

Rick turns back, and whatever the look was, it’s gone. His face is schooled into a familiar expression: calm, steady, a little concerned. Carl swallows hard, and grabs his hand.

“I love you.”

His dad’s fingers squeeze back. “I love you too, Carl.”

Then Carl lets go, and a moment later he’s alone with his thoughts.


End file.
